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How to shut down a Windows server hung due to frozen VSS writers

Shadow copies and VSS writers are pains in the ass. Sometimes you’ll try to shutdown Windows and it’ll freeze for hours stuck at the “Windows is shutting down” screen because it can’t shut down the VSS shadow copy providers are also hung.

To get around this, I’ll usually shut down those servers with the ‘shutdown /p /f’ command. This force option seems to do the job nicely.